Abstract
Jutta Gisela Sperling and Shona Kelly Wray, eds, Across the Religious Divide: Women, Property, and Law in the Wider Mediterranean (ca. 1300–1800), Routledge: Abingdon, 2010; 309 pp.; 9780415995863, £80.00 (hbk); 9780415807173, £28.99 (pbk)
This collection of essays focuses on women’s access to property, how familial ownership and marital property arrangements were regulated, and how these norms were applied in practice. The volume includes an introduction and 16 individual contributions which cover five hundred years. It addresses the marital property arrangements existing in the various religious cultures (Islamic, Jewish and Christian) of the Mediterranean world. Due to the great legal plurality that existed within this heterogeneous context, we are confronted with a wide diversity of patterns and logics, and of forms of inclusion or exclusion of women.
Underlining the need for an approach ‘that emphasizes the many local variations’ the volume pays attention to the permeability of legal practices, and to their adaptability to surrounding cultural contexts. The individual case studies, based on notarial and administrative documents (like wills, marriage contracts and dowry contracts), provide insights into the social practice of law and into women’s opportunities for agency, which often far exceeded those afforded by established norms.
Linda Guzzetti shows how in fourteenth-century Venice women – contrary to local laws – served as witnesses in courts, guaranteed loans and represented absent sons and husbands in property-related matters, as well as representing their own interests. In her study of Jewish communities in late-medieval Umbria, Karen Frank illustrates similar trends: widows administered their own wealth, and inherited that of their husbands; married women sold and leased property, and – contrary to Jewish law – acted independently in business matters. Elena Brizio argues that notwithstanding the existing dotal system, and the restrictions imposed by sumptuary laws, noblewomen in late medieval and early modern Siena enjoyed extensive access to the wealth of their husbands and families. As heiresses, they were actually given preference over their male relatives. Federica Francesconi concentrates on three portraits of Jewish women in Modena who in 1735 had founded a charitable association to benefit the sick, and she offers a subtle analysis of women’s restricted socioeconomic agency. Fariba Zarinebaf reveals the broad spectrum of economic activities in which women were engaged in Istanbul. They acted as lenders, owners, purchasers, sellers, administrators and landladies. Mary Ann Fay similarly emphasizes the fact that according to Islamic law women were legally competent. Taking the city of Cairo as her main case study, she shows that women could own, buy and sell every type of property independently of their husbands, fathers and brothers. They also administrated family waqfs and pious waqfs (endowments) on their own.
Anna Bellavitis examines whether forms of joint marital property prevailed over the dotal system, or could be set up via a marriage contract, and how this influenced the social position of wives and widows. Drawing on the example of Venice, she shows that joint-ownership arrangements strengthened the position of women, although they also made women liable for debts and left their wealth unprotected. Dana Wessell Lightfoot focuses on joint property arrangements (germanía) in marriage contracts, in early fifteenth-century Valencia. She points out that these arrangements contradicted the dowry system, while retaining a degree of economic advantage for women, in particular in peasant milieux. At the same time, they contributed to more balanced dynamics within gender relations. Similarly, Marija Morgorović Crljenko describes the model of joint administration – ‘marriage like brother and sister’ – in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Istria. Jutta Sperling stresses that, in seventeenth-century Lisbon, dowries by no means resulted in the daughters’ exclusion from inheritance, as attested by the many cases of women who wrote wills in favour of their nieces. Evdoxios Doxiadis describes how, on the islands of Naxos and Mykonos, daughters and sons received wealth designated as a ‘dowry’ as a form of pre-inheritance in accordance with Roman-Byzantine Law. Women had access to their share for the duration of their marriage. Numerous gifts from relatives were also mentioned in these dowry contracts.
Bequests made to charitable and pious institutions are the focus of several contributions in the volume, suggesting a competition for inheritance between relatives and the church – as Branka Grbavac observes in her study of noblewomen in fourteenth-century Zadar. At the same time, the question arises as to what wealth women could freely bequeath and above all to whom they actually left it. According to Shona Kelly Wray’s research on the region around Bologna in the fourteenth century, single women, in particular, gave consideration to more distant relatives.
The volume covers a wide range of themes, as well as spatial and chronological contexts. One can only wholeheartedly share the hope, expressed by the editors in the introduction, that ‘this volume will serve as a guide to promote further comparative research of women’s lives in all cultures of the Mediterranean.’ These contributions, all relatively short considering the complexity of the material they present, reveal a number of aspects which call for further exploration and systematic comparisons, which, of course, still remain to be done.